Preparing and giving a scientific talk

Introduction

Are you preparing an upcoming talk? How do you structure a talk? All of these questions will be addressed in this post.

When do you give scientific talks?

Scientific talks can be given at scientific conferences (multi-day meetings) or symposia (1 day meetings or part of a conference), departmental seminars (weekly re-occurring talks), lab meetings (weekly re-occurring talks), and other venues. Usually, talks fall into one of these time categories:

7-10 minute talks + 2-5 minutes of questions (usually at conferences or symposia)
30-45 minute talks + 30-15 minutes of questions (usually at departmental seminars and lab meetings)

Here’s an example of a 20 minute talk I gave in 2021 for the California Academy of Sciences:

Skip to minute 35 for my talk! :)

What is the purpose of giving a talk?

Usually, you present new or unpublished research to get your research out there so others can give you feedback or learn from your work.

How do I prepare a talk?

As you prepare to give a talk, I suggest asking a few big questions:

Who is your audience?
How much time do I have?
What is the main take-away message that I want people who see my talk to walk away with? These questions are critical for preparing your talk.

Top-level characteristics of a good talk

When your audience members listen to your talk, you want them to walk away with seeing how the information you presented is relevant to their interests and/or research. This is why you want to think carefully about your audience and what they care about, and how you can frame your ideas to be most impactful. Then, you want to think about how can frame your research story in the clearest way possible so that they can best understand you.

What are the steps to preparing a talk?

1. Find your story: ~1-3 months before your talk. Before giving a talk (or offering to give a talk), you should have a story with data (or without) that you think it would be useful to present. You may be wanting to present to get feedback on new work or get completed work out there in the public domain. Think carefully about your reasoning for giving the talk before offering to give one or getting started preparing one.

2. Storyboard your talk: ~2-3 weeks before your talk. You want to diagram out all of the parts of your talk. I like to do this by writing out a rough outline or script of what I want to say, and then draw out the best way to communicate that idea next to it. Here is an example of a storyboard I wrote for a talk:

At the end of the day, you want to limit the amount of text and maximize the number of graphics to illustrate your ideas, so any ideas that you can depict using graphics, the better. It's best to think about this now (and sketch it out), before actually making any graphics because those take a lot of time. More on making graphics later.

3. Make your slides: ~1-2 weeks before your talk. Next is putting your slides together for your talk. More on this later.

4. Give a rough practice talk: ~1 week before your talk. About a week before your talk, you want to give a practice talk (even if it is very rough) to get general feedback about how you structure your information, how you present your data, etc. The useful feedback may change major parts of your talk (like your introduction and conclusion) and may result in your making large changes like changing the order, etc. People you get feedback may be able to give you suggestions about your audience, etc.

5. Give your final practice talk: ~2-3 days before your talk. A few days before your talk, you'll want to give a final practice talk. This is when you don't want to make any major changes, but want to get feedback about minor stylistic changes (such as changing colors that are hard to see, typos, etc.) and suggestions for improving your speaking style.

6. Practice your final talk: ~1-2 days before your talk. In the days leading up to your talk, practice your talk! Depending on how comfortable you are with public speaking, practice may help you feel more at ease OR make you sound like a robot. This can also change as you get more comfortable giving talks. If you're giving your first talk, practicing is often a good idea --especially to get your timing down. You NEVER want to go over on time, so it's important that you know for sure that you'll be able to finish your talk in the correct timeframe.

7. Final stuff: ~Night before your talk. The night before your talk, don't pull an all-nighter! Make sure that you get plenty of rest, relax, and feel confident that all of your hard work is going to pay off tomorrow!

Parts of a talk: top-level

The timing is for a 7-10 minute talk.

Introduction (2-3 mins):

What is the big picture of your research? Why should someone care about your research question, even if they don't study your study system?

What is the big picture in ecology and evolution your research is addressing?
What previous research informs your research question?
What study system are you using? Why is this study system uniquely situated to answer your specific question?

Tips for preparing a good introduction

2. Specific Research Questions/Hypotheses (1 min):

Outline specific hypotheses and your predictions.

3. Research methods (30 seconds):

How do you go about doing your research project? What methods did you use? This often represented best using a graphic/schematic.

4. Results (4 mins)

Show figures about the results.

5. Conclusions (1 min):

Contextualize your results into the big picture questions you presented at the beginning. Why would an ecologist who studies a completely different subject area care about this?

Here's a schematic I made about this topic for the BIO 47 class (SP2020):

Graphics style tips:

Here’s an example of a graphic I made when I was an undergrad that could be improved:

Here’s a more clear graphic that I made more recently:

Resources for making graphics:

Suggestions on improving slide design:

Avoid small fonts
Avoid excess animation
Not too much text, concise bullets
Keep slide design clear and readable: Minimal is better!
Callie’s preference: I really hate default templates

Improving plots:

A basic plot in R:

An improved plot:

Explaining a figure:

Walk through the axes
If it is confusing, show what you’d expect first
Show data in parts
Recap the main conclusion at the end & make the main conclusion the title of the slide (or featured on the slide in some way)

Speaking Style:

Practice, practice, practice:

Technology:

Practice any hand-offs on Zoom between partners or moderator/s
Eye contact, where you are looking
Environment on Zoom(sound, lighting if video is on, virtual backgrounds)

2. Timing:

Time allocation between sections and speakers
Who speaks when? Have this practiced if there are multiple speakers

3. Language

Not too fast!
Avoid“filler”words
Speak clearly

But don’t practice too much!

Get a good night’s sleep the day before so you’re alert and rested Don’t be a perfectionist!
Enjoy yourself!

Taking Questions:

Questions can be intimidating, but we are all here to support you!
You are the expert on the specific topic that you are presenting on!
It's okay not to have an answer; you can say, “That’s a good question. I’ll look up the answer and get back to you.”
Embed questions into presentation: “I won’t have time to address this interesting aspect of my project here, but ask me about it in the Q&A!”

A PSA for Question askers:

Questions should not be comments!
Questions are not about making you look smart!
Questions should be constructive to the speaker and the other audience members!

Additional resources:

The single best way to get better at giving talks is to watch talks! Here is a great resource for watching eco-evo seminar talks: https://twitter.com/evoecoseminars?lang=en Your lab probably has recordings of talks they can also share with you!